Come and Gone
by Bakdraft
Summary: One Vaultie's tale of the beginning of the end.


I remember June 9th. It was before your time, back in 2077, but that day signified the arrival of the Four Atomic Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I was your age then, just an acne-ridden high school kid who wrote for the newspaper and played a few sports here and there. Back when there was a civilization. We're all that's left. Honestly, I don't know whether you poor kids are lucky or damned, being born in the Vault and all. But I'm getting off track.  
  
So back to June. It was a real nice day, warm and quiet. Sure, the news was full of nastiness, with the oil crisis and the invasion of China, but for me, it wasn't a real big deal. The only things I worried about were getting my article in for the last issue of the school paper before summer break started, and that after next year I might be drafted. It was just a normal day until third period, when the principal came in over the intercom announcing that school was cancelled and all students and staff were to proceed to the cafeteria immediately. In the halls, rumors were flying around, from school being cancelled early and that something big had happened, like we had won the war. We'd been called together for the announcement that the United States had annexed Canada, but school had never been cancelled.  
  
I remember breaking from the flow of students heading for the cafeteria and ducking into the boys bathroom on the first floor when the sirens started. One fire siren was of little interest, but when all the sirens picked up at once, I got the idea that something was very, very wrong. Sure, it could have been a big fire, I figured, but when did anything like that ever occur? None of the sirens ever started all at once. Outside, I could hear everyone pause. It was deathly silent for a second before someone screamed something about an air raid and suddenly the halls erupted. People began spilling through the door as they were pushed aside in the rush to get out. I didn't waste any time either, taking an abandoned book bag and chucking it through the bathroom window before realizing there was still a long drop from the window to the ground. So I huddled in a stall and closed the door, and waited. In a little bit, it was quiet outside, so I ran from the school and home. The sirens were still wailing, but our little town of Mannerley was empty.  
  
Even my family had left when I got there, our possessions scattered about on the lawn and indoors from the mad rush to get our valuables. The car was gone, and so was the dog with it, so I assumed they meant to meet up with me later. I haven't seen them since, nor do I hold any hope they've somehow survived outside a Vault for the last seventeen years. I'm not against optimism, but it's better to face realism when you're safe in your own prison against an invisible foe. Although it's not impossible, I can't place my mind on a dream that's too improbable to occur, for sanity's sake.  
  
So I got out my unfortunately neglected bike, ripped the hard drives from my computer, got some food and stuff, and headed for the Vault, something I had discovered a while before during a spat with my folks where I ran away from home. Down in the cliffs and above the river, it was real hard to find. No one in town really knew where it was, since Vault-Tec built a few Vaults specifically for officials and stuff. There were public Vaults under the big cities, like the Bakersfield Vault and the LA Vault, but I knew I could never get to those. Back then, we knew that the bomb might hit us, but it got lost in the media's play over the sheer quality and size of the Vaults, "The Fallout Shelter of Tomorrow's American!". Rather than a necessity, they were just a safety against a catastrophe no one expected. This Vault we're in now, your home, was still under construction on a few sections when the Big One hit. You know the big rock walls on Level 3? That's one of the areas they never finished.  
  
But back to the story. So I got here, and found a whole lot of limousines waiting in line to dump their passengers at the blast door, all of them your parents or the folks you know already. Unfortunately, my family wasn't there, but I was let in anyway. It was real quiet as everyone started to prepare for the night, and started to share what they knew. I remember hearing from Mr. Lucas the first real news of what had happened. Although his mind is a little gone these days, he's a good man, and he sort of adopted me when they closed the Vault off from the first signs of increased radiation. So, he told me that an ICBM had hit Washington, D.C., but where it came from no one knew. That explained the sirens, but then I realized something else. The government had created the M.A.D. policy nearly a hundred years before, which meant "Mutually Assured Destruction". Simply put, it's an eye for a eye that leaves us all blind. M.A.D. dictates that if a nuclear weapon ever strikes United States soil, there are targets pre-programmed into our ICBMs to strike missile sites and foreign population centers worldwide. Something clicked inside me, and I resigned myself to the knowledge that this was it. For all my angsty teenage stupidity, I still knew when the end was the end. That night, they shut the blast door, and everyone prepared themselves for the worst. Late that evening, the whole place started to shake as the bombs started falling about seventy miles away. It kept up until about three in the morning. Then we started to try for contact with the world outside, to make sure it over and we could leave. We're still waiting.  
  
Human civilization had been reduced to a fraction of itself living in highly advanced caves. Our prison is our ride to freedom, I suppose. I just hope that you realize there was a world outside, and it was a beautiful world. Those pictures in the library don't do Earth justice, but I suppose you kids don't have anything else to go on. Maybe someday you will, but not in my lifetime. It's going to be a hot zone out there for one helluva long while. Perhaps it's a good thing that the world's been wiped out, sort a clean slate for humanity not to make the same mistakes, not to devour its resources and then blow itself to kingdom come. But that's idealism. It won't take away the fact that nine billion people and millenia of history all went the way of the dinosaur in a few flashes of light. It hurts those of us who've been out there, who know that humanity was a glorious thing.  
  
But no one knows who started it. You kids have probably seen the picture of the first ICBM nosing into Washington. Is that a USAF on the side? Who knows? I don't know what to think anymore. But I still wake up every day and do my duties. Like I said, I can't live on prayer that someday I'll get out of this godforsaken sterile hole in the ground, but there's hope. Someday, you kids will know that a bird is something more than a flying animal you've seen in the films from Vault-Tec. Or that people didn't always have to ration water, and went swimming in it. I hope you kids get to see grass, to lie in the sun beneath a tree, and stare into a clear blue sky without a hazard suit to worry about. The Earth will heal, and so will we. 


End file.
